Kevin Libin: Alberta’s Tories risk another nose dive

There plainly isn’t much that Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives have to learn from their Liberal adversaries, given that the Conservatives are celebrating this week their 40th year in government while the Liberals, just a few weeks earlier, marked their 90th year of being out of power in the province. But arranging an efficient and effective way to elect a strong leader might just be one.

Both parties are in the midst of a leadership race. The Liberals’ wraps up Saturday. For sure. The Tories’ might on Sept. 17. But probably not. The Liberals will appoint the candidate who can most energize not just Liberal diehards, but Albertans who might vote Liberal if they had the right leader. The Tories could well end up with a winner that only a minority of members are all that passionate about.

That’s what happened last time. In the 2006 race to replace Ralph Klein, when the first ballot votes were counted, Jim Dinning and Ted Morton were far ahead of Ed Stelmach with 30% and 26% support to Mr. Stelmach’s 15%. With no clear majority, all three advanced to the second ballot, a week later, where members voted for their first pick as well as their backup choice. Mr. Stelmach spent the interim days luring support from eliminated candidates, by promising them Cabinet seats, and selling memberships to fellow northlanders panicked at putting yet another Calgarian in charge. With no majority winner on the second ballot, when the preferential votes were tallied, deep-blue Morton supporters had turned so bitterly against their red-Tory rival, Mr. Dinning, that their second-choice votes pushed Mr. Stelmach over the top.

The story of the third-place finisher who climbed his way up to a slightly less unpopular second choice would not end well for Mr. Stelmach, or the PCs: The Premier will step down this fall without having finished even one full, elected term, pressured by insurrection within his own party and nosediving popularity among voters. He leaves having turned so many against him that the PCs’ biggest electoral threat is now the breakaway former Tories of the Wildrose party. The compromise candidate ended up compromising the security of a four-decade dynasty.

With six contenders this time and two clear front-runners once again — Mr. Morton, after stepping down as finance minister, and Gary Mar, a Klein-era Cabinet minister and recent provincial envoy in Washington, D.C. — the likelihood of another second ballot, two weeks after the first, and another weak candidate coming up the middle, look all too real.

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The process “makes things of a lot more unpredictable,” says Sam Armstrong, one of Mr. Morton’s campaign managers. “I’m not going to lament that we’re doing well…. But that should translate into something, when you go through the first round. If you don’t get a majority and you’re in a position of strength, it should translate into more than what it does under the current process.”

Alberta’s Liberals aren’t into such convoluted schemes. In their party, anyone can vote for a leader, even non-members willing to endorse one of their five candidates — no $5 membership required. And votes are tallied by riding, each riding counting for a maximum 100 points (a candidate who wins 20% of a riding gets 20 points). That process drew 28,000 interested Albertans to register to vote in person, online or by phone, four times as many that came out when the Liberals last elected a leader in 2008.

Mostly it seems they’ve flocked to Raj Sherman, a doctor and former Tory MLA who amassed some celebrity after getting booted from the Tory caucus earlier in the year for clashing with his premier over health policies. He’s bombarded the province with demon-dialers, reportedly signing up more than half of all those voters himself, only a handful of whom, the party’s executive director has assured candidates, are unaware they’ve somehow been registered, dead, fictional or cats.

But the dynamic Dr. Sherman may be precisely the strong jolt that could rescue the Liberals, who have fallen in to such decrepitude that, according to one leadership candidate, half the constituency associations in Edmonton, and two-thirds in Calgary, are no longer even active. (When leadership candidate Hugh McDonald calls his own party the “best-kept political secret in the province of Alberta,” you know the well of praise has run dry.) As a former Tory, fixated on the single health issue, prone to emotional outbursts and raising unsubstantiated allegations about government corruption and bribery, Dr. Sherman comes with certain risks. But the Liberals have tried safe and staid before, with dismal results. This process promises to ensure they’ll pick the most magnetic candidate of the lot.

“It favours a dynamic individual, a person with the best organization who can round up supporters get them registered and get them out to vote,” says Keith Brownsey, a political scientist at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. “The Conservatives have the possibility of picking another Ed Stelmach.”

As the Liberals seek the saviour that will keep them alive, the Tories must find one that keeps them from eventually becoming the next Liberals, a former dynasty sentenced to an eternity in opposition. Mr. Stelmach is their second leader in a row hustled out the door to stave off sinking poll numbers. The disquiet has left the PCs deeply divided. Party insiders estimate that membership sales, with just a week left in the race, are well below where they were in the last leadership contest. Another middling, come-up-the-middle leader is something they can scarcely afford, Mr. Brownsey says. A candidate who can’t even excite the party base will have little chance of setting the province alight.

Mr. Morton, one candidate willing to admit he takes seriously the dangers the Wildrose poses to the PCs — not least because he’s positioned himself as having the right-wing bona fides to reunite the warring camps — has been warning in stump speeches of the existential risk of another accidental, humdrum leader. Meantime, his team and Mr. Mar’s have largely steered clear of antagonizing the other, fearing a repeat of the polarization that undid the two front-runners in the last race’s preferential ballot.

Former justice minister turned candidate Alison Redford has also warned that “if this party thinks just changing the leader is enough, we will not win the next election.” Her fellow candidate, Rick Orman, a Getty-era Cabinet minister, has said much the same thing. No doubt the remaining two — MLA Doug Griffiths and former minister Doug Horner — also see themselves as precisely the compelling and galvanizing leader the party desperately needs. And no doubt they’d all accept a leadership victory just as readily no matter what mathematical electoral fluke handed it to them.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.